Autoscript. 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow | Developer's Toolbox. Advertisement JavaScript is an integral part of the RIA revolution. JavaScript allows developers to create rich and interactive web interfaces and establish asynchronous communication with servers for constantly up-to-date data without a page refresh. Many things that were once accomplished using Flash objects can now be built using JavaScript – with the added benefit that it is free, typically more web and mobile accessible under most circumstances using best practices for development techniques, and without the need to use proprietary software for development. Though JavaScript has been around for a while, new tools, techniques, and information are constantly being pumped out to continually push the technology into greater heights. In this article, we wish to share with you a huge list of fresh and new tools and resources that JavaScript developers will find useful and informative.
Here are a few other posts that you might find interesting: Useful JavaScript Tools. jQuery TOOLS - The UI library for the Web. Roll your own social network using WordPress | Blog. If the social network is the next message board, the social network has been waiting for its phpBB or vBulletin; the software that would give thousands upon thousands of people the ability to easily set up their own social networks. Now the social networking market may have that. WordPress, the most popular open-source blogging platform, can now be turned into a fully-fledged social network. That's thanks to a sister project called BuddyPress, which was officially released in production release form yesterday. BuddyPress is basically a set of plug-ins that sit on top of WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress. With BuddyPress installed, a WordPress MU install is transformed into a social network with the standard social networking features, including profile pages, private messaging, friends, groups, an activity stream and forums.
Status updates and photo albums are planned for later in the year. Does the release of BuddyPress change the social networking game? Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes - ReadWriteWeb. There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual. Today I saw a tool for finding those various profile pages that really impressed me. About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API.
It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. Called simply Identify, Jones's tool is a Firefox plug-in you can evoke from any web page that has links tagged rel="me". The data that gets displayed can be frightening if you've exposed more information about yourself than you'd like on a rel="me" linked page.
The tool is clearly very useful as a way to learn more about people whose usernames you come across online. jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library. AJAX developers continue migrating to unobtrusive JavaScript. Unobtrusive JavaScript is an emerging technique that separates JavaScript from HTML markup. This is quite similar to the separation between styling and HTML that came about with the creation of CSS in the late 90s. For example, obtrusive JavaScript would add an onClick handler directly to an input field like this: Unobsutrive JavaScript waits until the page has finished loading before hooking up the event handler to the input field: <script type="text/javascript"> Event.observe(window, 'load', function() { Event.observe($('field'), 'click', function() { alert('hello'); }; });</script> This keeps the HTML (our input tag in this example) clean and provides the developer with a single point of reference for debugging JavaScript code.
Unobtrusive JavaScript is typically stored in external .js files as opposed to being embedded inside <script> tags in the HTML page itself. Some other benefits of unobtrusive JavaScript include: The Next-Gen Web: Browser Storage Support. The next-gen web is starting to gather pace, as this week MySpace integrated Google Gears, Yahoo! Announced their new BrowserPlus product and Google launched a browser-based edition of their 3D Earth product. Technologies and formats such as AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX, Gears, XUL, Web Applications 1.0 (DOM5, HTML5 etc.) allow developers to accelerate beyond AJAX and towards a new generation of web applications with better performance, more functionality and tighter desktop integration.
Developers and users are now presented with more web technology choice then ever before; “DLL hell” has been superseded by “plug-in hell”, as a variety of companies present their versions of what the next-gen web will look like. But on the web, such choice can come at a cost to both users and developers. With the new rich web application technologies still in the development phase, there is an opportunity to not repeat the mistakes of the past and instead take a standards-based approach. Why we should learn to script. Let’s think about programming today. Or scripting, if you will. To go beyond static pages of text and images online, you will need at least a little programming. One reason why I advocate for everyone to learn at least a little is that if you bog down your newsroom’s expert programmer with too many trivial tasks, he or she will never have time to do any real work. You pay a real programmer too much to waste his or her time.
It’s inefficient. It indicates poor management decision-making. Bad resource allocation. Another reason: A person who understands the basic ideas of programming is in a better position to conceptualize good ways to do digital stuff. I was reading some related ideas in this interview in Columbia Journalism Review, in which Brad Stenger, of Wired magazine, said: In 1994-95, part of my job was to have a weekly meeting with the head of IT (and his deputy) at The Washington Post. Too many journalists and editors and publishers think “an IT guy” is a programmer. Alternating colors in tables, using javascript. Many sites that present tabular data use alternating background colors to increase the readability of that data.
And as I developed a site, I realised I wanted to do that, too. The problem? In my case the table was not generated by a server side application or script of which you can find numerous examples on the Web. The obvious solution was to hardcode every second row to ensure it had a different background color. But I wanted the table to be dynamic, so that it was possible to add a new row in the middle of the table without changing the background color attribute of the rows that followed. My solution uses JavaScript, as CSS3 isn’t truly a viable option yet. Browsers today still struggle to support CSS1 and CSS2. Getting Started Let’s start with an ordinary html table. <table id="theTable"> <tr><td>0 - some txt</td></tr> <tr><td>1 - some txt</td></tr> <tr><td>2 - some txt</td></tr> <tr><td>3 - some txt</td></tr> <tr><td>4 - some txt</td></tr> </table> if(document.getElementById)
Javascript tutorial w3. Narratives and flash versus css,html and javascript. Can you do great narrative storytelling purely in XHTML and CSS? Or do you need Flash? This provocative question stems from a recent blog post by Khoi Vinh, design director for nytimes.com. He didn’t come straight out and ask that, but pretty close: My complaint, right now, is that the majority of storytelling that happens on the Web is based in the interactively rich environment made possible by Flash. Flash has its uses, and I have no particular disdain for the medium.
But its unique value is becoming less essential over time even as native tools like CSS and JavaScript become more capable. No argument from me. One simple reason for this — especially in journalism — is that there are very few people who are well-versed in both techniques. In the comments on Vinh’s post, Jeff Croft wrote: Flash is a tool that designers naturally gravitate towards. That makes good sense as an explanation. Narrative storytelling What Vinh’s post does not quite get at, though, is the crux of storytelling.